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ASTRTAL BODIES AND TANTRIC SEX

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SETTING out on this review, I feel a slight tremor of fear. Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969, that's right, 101 years, and she died with an extraordinary number of wits about her), a bourgeois Parisian, became a fully qualified tantric lama in Tibet when she was 52 years old. Tantric Buddhism has been known to follow the left-handed, or demonic, way.

Do I dare to discuss a magic entity that is calmly gazing through the screen of my word processor, wearing a rosary necklace of 108 pieces of human skull, an apron of carved human bones (rattling slightly), and holding a phurba, the higher-sphere crystal dagger that kills ghosts but may also seriously disturb or even switch off the regular flesh-and-blooded, by penetrating our astral bodies?

I'll take the risk, especially since I don't at all intend to offend her. Lama Alexandra, a spunky soul in an attractive five-foot-tall body when young, tending in later life to be overweight at times, known, erroneously, as ''Our Lady of Tibet'' or ''Superwoman with a French accent,'' has become an example to which freethinkers burn incense as a result of her both cynical and rationally honest approach.

Mme. David-Neel was a compulsive traveler, an explorer, an opera singer, a feminist, a prolific and internationally popular writer and an acknowledged authority on Buddhist ritual. During her many years in Tibet, the local Buddhist clergy sometimes classified her - with good reason - as an incarnation of the Thunderbolt Sow, the only female deity in their Mahayana (advanced Buddhist) pantheon, a fearful archetype that inspires red-hatted adepts. Her stay at Kum Bum monastery in Amdo Province made her familiar with spells. She did cause a sudden thunderstorm out of the blue to frighten bandits off while traveling across the arid highlands of the ''roof of the world,'' she did warm herself by tumo, or ''pit of the stomach,'' meditation, making flames embrace her when she ran out of fuel and food in deep snow, and on a lower spiritual plane, she did carry a modern automatic seven-shot pistol that she fired at least once, aiming at a brigand who tried to steal her last tin spoon.

Fortunately, she didn't kill him, according to her present biographers, Barbara M. Foster, an assistant professor in the library department of Hunter College, City University of New York, and Michael Foster, a novelist. Practicing Buddhists try to avoid taking life. David-Neel did eat meat products, though, including the soles of her boots, and in a drafty tent at 50 degrees below zero she slurped maggoty stew cooked by a substance-abusing butcher.

While often looking down on women who enslaved men, she endlessly milked money out of Philip Neel, her hardworking husband. Showing a prudish image to her royalty-paying public, she hid an affair with a stagehand, a live-in relationship with a fellow artist in France and an invitation to be seduced on her future husband's yacht in Tunisia. Perhaps, if we may follow her biographers' hint, she participated in tantric sex, the free-for-all physical activity in which masters and disciples partake in order to raise their spirits toward detachment. ''Debauchery,'' you say? Well, the activity could lead to that if misapplied, David-Neel said. She disapproved of this ''promiscuity of embarrassments,'' but then, you see, she wasn't really there, she was just hiding in a hayloft. (She peeked.) She had a violent temper that very few - indeed, only Aphur Yongden, her faithful associate, and, in her old age, her secretary, Marie-Madeleine Peyronnet -were able to handle.

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Barbara and Michael Foster venture to show us some of the shadowy side of this truly great woman, and the shadows are most acceptably human. The authors' scholarly but easily readable book improves on Jean Chalon's extensive but seemingly biased and rather shallow study, which was published in France in 1985, and their diligent research located two new and most notable sources of accurate information, which add an important additional dimension to the story.

David-Neel traveled in a time when Britain ruled not only waves but also mountains. The British secret service was wary of the mysterious Frenchwoman who hobnobbed with Oriental princes and high lamas in palaces and fortresses where political plans were hatched. The authors obtained access to Government of India files, which showed that the ''French Nun,'' as she was code-named, was indeed carefully followed. They also read through David-Neel's letters to her husband, some 5,000 typewritten sheets, in which she quarreled with and cajoled and loved the lonely man and told him what she really was doing, as opposed to the popular accounts in her books.

She mostly moved, having her very own adventures in very wild lands, while collecting priceless books and artifacts. Her Tibetan was so fluent that she was taken for an indigenous speaker. Nothing stopped her. When subzero snowstorms howled, she crossed passes that local roughnecks stayed away from.

CALLING herself a rational Buddhist, she tried to live well, taking a hot bath every day (a coolie carried the bathtub), eating gourmet meals (she never cooked herself), riding good horses and being carried by sturdy bearers. When Lhasa, the political and spiritual capital, couldn't be reached that way, she walked, crawled, lived on boiled water and dirt, became seriously ill, begged, pretended to be a servant to her servant (who later became her adopted son and companion, Lama Yongden, a source of much jealousy to her husband). She reached the forbidden holy city, the first foreign woman to do so, ever. She wrote 25 books, some popular best sellers, like ''Magic and Mystery in Tibet'' and ''My Journey to Lhasa,'' some of great value to the few, such as ''The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects.'' Although professing to be a true scholar, she was vague on dates and places. Although claiming to be original, she was accused of plagiarizing others' notes. Although frowning on Christian missionaries, she often recuperated in their care.

In her esoteric essays she discussed the beauty of Buddha's compassion, while privately she complained about the ''sinister farce our parents played on us by bringing us into this world.'' Even so, she kept trying. Even so, her insights, as can be gleaned in all her work, are, to say the least, impressive, and, to say a lot more, most helpful to us others.

Hers was a great human life, very well written up in ''Forbidden Journey.'' Lately, several of Alexandra David-Neel's books have been freshly translated or reprinted here. Surely this biography will provoke even more interest and allow proper use of her life - a superbly adventurous, disciplined and intelligent effort to grasp wisdom that happened to stray within our rightful reach.

Janwillem van de Wetering is the author of two books on Buddhism, ''The Empty Mirror'' and ''A Glimpse of Nothingness,'' and a Zen police procedural series that includes ''The Sergeant's Cat.''

A version of this review appears in print on January 10, 1988, on Page 7007012 of the National edition with the headline: ASTRTAL BODIES AND TANTRIC SEX. Today's Paper|Subscribe